Speranza,
You wrote: Well, the conceptual definition of lying is quite a trick. . . .
I would think the Griceian approach to this is complex, and perhaps relying on
his “Intention and uncertainty.” It seems ‘intention’ is essential. Violating
the maxim pertaining to the category of ‘quantitas’ (“Do not say what you
believe to be false”) seems central in communication. Yet of course, most
figures of speech (qua conversational impicatures) are a sort of ‘lie’:
‘metaphor,’ ‘hyperbole,’ ‘litotes,’ ‘irony’. If the intention is there on the
part of the utterer that the addressee will recognise that the utterer is
‘flouting’ the maxim, things seem okay, even for Kant.
Faulkner, granted, lied. If following philosopher D.F. Pears in “Motivated
irrationality,” see see Faulker as believing his lies, a further caveat is
needed. Faulkner may have ended up believing his lies. It is obvious that his
novels were a way to ‘legitimise’ those lies into ‘fictional narratives’ that
perhaps only a die-hard Oxonian (from Oxford, Mississippi) would regard as a
lie!
Let us say as I think perhaps you may have been implying (but since this was
your last post of the day [yesterday] perhaps you were not entirely clear),
that Faulkner initially intended to lie when he described his rum smuggling and
aerial combat over France during WWI (Pears), but eventually he became mixed up
in his thinking (Speranza) as many of us do when we age and began believing as
truth what he originated in the past as lies; therefore (you may be implying)
Faulkner was not a liar, at least not insofar as he came to believe as true the
lies he told at an earlier date.
To take this a bit farther, since he believed (what in retrospect we might
conclude ought to have been a lie), namely that he could handle a difficult
horse, perhaps at his age his belief-system was such that he no longer lied
about anything.
And since he died, as you said, many years ago in “Virginia” [He actually died
in Mississippi, a mistake you probably wouldn’t have made if it weren’t your
last post of the day), I wonder how his defense went when he stood before God
(if he believed there was a God): God: You were a liar all your life,
William.
WF: No I wasn’t. I never lied and I can prove it. Search my soul and you
will see that I believed everything I said.
God: I’ve already done that, and as you will recall Romans 1: 28-31: “. . .
since [you] did not think it worthwhile to retain the knowledge of God, he gave
[you] over to a depraved mind, to do what ought not to be done. [You] have
become filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, greed and depravity. [You]
are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit and malice. . .”
WF: You’re just describing my novels. I want to take the fifth.
Or, to put it another way, Faulkner originally *chose* to lie. The fact that
he later came to believe as true what he originally chose to lie about was
still, at the time his fell from his horse, the result of his original choice.
And also, let us consider someone sitting on death row, Troy Clark, who was
convicted in 2000 of killing Christina Muse, but has been denying the crime for
all the years since. he is one day executed. Suppose you could convey this
to Greg Abbot (the wheel-chair bound Governor of Texas). Might you stand a
chance of convincing him that even though Troy Clark may have killed his
room-mate Christina Muse, he has protested his innocence so long that he
doesn’t remember drowning her and stuffing her body in a barrel of lime.
Therefore, you tell the governor, since he doesn’t remember killing Christina
Muse, he ought not to be given the lethal injection.
Lawrence
PaterFrom: lit-ideas-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:lit-ideas-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Redacted sender ;
"jlsperanza" for DMARC
Sent: Monday, October 22, 2018 7:00 PM
To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [lit-ideas] Re: Be perspicuous [sic]
My last post today, good night!
Helm:
“Elsewhere, Power writes, “Bleikasten stresses the fact that Faulkner was a
storyteller in both senses of the term.”
In my previous posting, I was wondering if Bleikasten should have spent some
time reading Grice – “Senses should not be multiplied beyond necessity.” Who
says ‘storyteller has TWO senses? It is obvious what Powers thinks Bleikasten
means by two ‘senses’ here, but a Griceian should see no reason to speak of the
expression ‘story-teller’ having two of them!
Helm quotes from Powers:
“Faulkner loved writing complex stories of ‘the human heat in conflict with
itself’ (a phrase he used in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech in Stockholm in
1950), and he compulsively embroidered the bare facts of his own prosaic life.
Writing later about the months he lived in New Orleans in 1925, Falkner claimed
that he supported himself by “working for a bootlegger. He had a launch that I
would take down [Lake] Ponchartrain into the Gulf to an island where the rum,
the green rum, would be brought up from Cuba and buried, and we would dig it up
and bring it back to New Orleans. . . . And I would get a hundred dollars a
trip for that.’ “Nothing about this story was true, but just as remarkable is
where he told it – in an American lit class at West Point in April 1962, about
two months before he died. “Yet bigger lies were told about his eventless
months with the Canadian Royal Air Force; after the war he limped from
imaginary machine gun wounds suffered, he claimed, in aerial duels over the
fields of France. Faulkner was still in flight school when the war ended, was
never sent to France, was never wounded in combat as he claimed, and never even
took up a plane alone until years later. . . Bleikasten is blunt about
Faulkner’s fabrications and writes that ‘he lied to his parents, his brothers,
his friends, and later his son-in-law, his mistresses, his editors, his
colleagues in Hollywood, and his doctors.””
Helm comments:
“How judgmental Bleikasten and Powers are being is unclear because immediately
following the above, Powers writes “In time Faulkner told fewer tall tales and
had the deeper pleasure of constructing elaborate fictions in prose.””
Indeed. Helm goes on: “A reader might be excused from concluding that if he
learns to lie well enough perhaps he too can incorporate his lies into stories
and perhaps one day win a Nobel Prize.”
As Borges would say, what is literature but a ‘fiction’? Is poetry a fiction,
though? “Fiction” possibly has just ONE sense – as any other expression. And
it’s not clear how Powers makes the passage. Powers seems to be implicating
that there is a flouting here of Grice’s ‘qualitas’ conversational category –
“do not say what you believe to be false.” Novelists are expected, whether they
get the Nobel or not!
Helm: “Anthony Trollope in his Autobiography writes “Whether the world does or
does not become more wicked as years go on is a question which probably has
disturbed the minds of thinkers since the world began to think. That men have
become less cruel, less violent, less selfish, less brutal, there can be no
doubt; -- but have they become less honest?”
Meaning ‘truthful,’ in this context. (“Honesty is the best policy, says I --
This proverb is first found in the writings of Sir Edwin Sandys, the English
politician and colonial entrepreneur, who was prominent in the Virginia Company
which founded the first English settlement in America, at Jamestown, Virginia.
In Europae Speculum, 1599, Sandys wrote, “Our grosse conceipts, who think
honestie the best policie.”
Helm ends his quotation from Trollope:
“If so, can a world, retrograding from day to day in honesty, be considered to
be in a state of progress? We know the opinion on this subject of our
philosopher Mr Carlyle. If he be right, we are all going straight away to
darkness and the dogs. But then we do not put very much faith in Mr Carlyle –
nor in Mr Ruskin and his followers. The loudness and extravagance of their
lamentations, the wailing and gnashing of teeth which comes from them, over a
world which is supposed to have gone altogether shoddy-wards, are so contrary
to the convictions of men who cannot but see how comfort has been increased,
how health has been improved, and education extended – that the general effect
of their teaching is the opposite of what they have intended. It is regarding
simply as Carlylism to say that the English-speaking world is growing worse
form day to day. And it is Carlylism to opine that the general grand result of
increased intelligence is a tendency to deterioration.”
Helm comments:
“I am apparently typically American in not liking Faulkner or his novels. Not
liking him because his lies sounds a bit archaic however. Lying has been
worked upon by politicians. “Spinning” and “Spin Doctors” are a fact of
politics and not considered lying.”
Well, the conceptual definition of lying is quite a trick. Grice makes fun, for
once, of Kant, in “Aspects of reason,” which is fun, because in “Logic and
Conversation” he is echoing Kant and calling himself ‘enough of a rationalist’
to be ‘echoing Kant’. In “Aspects of Reason” Grice is bringing up the ridicule
Kant received in the English-speaking world. Kant’s systematic refutation of
lying as regarded as too ‘rigouristic’. It’s, granted, all different with
Faulkner’s archaic white lies.
Helm concludes his interesting post: “When a famous politician is caught in
flagrante delicto, he doesn’t admit that he did anything wrong, nor does he
admit that he was lying about it up until the very time he was caught. He says
“I made a mistake.” Lying was not involved. Carlyle and Ruskin were clearly
wrong. Modern man spins and makes mistakes. He does not lie.”
I would think the Griceian approach to this is complex, and perhaps relying on
his “Intention and uncertainty.” It seems ‘intention’ is essential. Violating
the maxim pertaining to the category of ‘quantitas’ (“Do not say what you
believe to be false”) seems central in communication. Yet of course, most
figures of speech (qua conversational impicatures) are a sort of ‘lie’:
‘metaphor,’ ‘hyperbole,’ ‘litotes,’ ‘irony’. If the intention is there on the
part of the utterer that the addressee will recognise that the utterer is
‘flouting’ the maxim, things seem okay, even for Kant.
Faulkner, granted, lied. If following philosopher D.F. Pears in “Motivated
irrationality,” see see Faulker as believing his lies, a further caveat is
needed. Faulkner may have ended up believing his lies. It is obvious that his
novels were a way to ‘legitimise’ those lies into ‘fictional narratives’ that
perhaps only a die-hard Oxonian (from Oxford, Mississippi) would regard as a
lie!
Cheers,
Speranza
REFERENCE
Grice, H. P. “Aspects of Reason,” Oxford, Clarendon Press. (On Kant on lying).
